There are some numbers in the Bible which seem to have significance. The Book of Revelation for example has symbolic numbers such as seven, twelve, and one thousand. This does not mean that the Bible is numerological, or that there is some number code by which the Bible hides certain insights.

on Numerology (Part 1)

When I was a young Christian, a sister in the church of Christ gave me a small book by F.C. Payne of South Australia, entitled The Seal of God. She should have known better. This book persuasively promoted a system of supposed Biblical numerology, claiming it to be a second level of revelation for the discerning reader of scripture and observer of structures in nature. Fortunately my father advised me to treat this stuff as a Satanic doctrine and I rid myself of the booklet. Many other such books have been written so let's look at the question of numbers in the Bible.

Overview of Numerology

Numbers are given cryptic significance in numerological systems, especially the numbers 1 to 9. A number of several digits is reduced to its essence by adding the digits together, and if necessary continuing to add the resulting digits together, until a single digit is obtained. However a numerological system may keep 10 as a basic number separate from 1, and may also assign qualities to certain other double digit numbers.

Letters of the alphabet also have significance because each letter is converted to its ordinal number in the alphabet, A=1, B=2, C=3 etc. Letters with double digits are reduced to one digit. Thus, for example, the letters B-K-T share the number 2 because K=11 and 1+1=2, whilst T=20 and 2+0=2. Of course "the alphabet" differs from language to language, and some languages have more than one alphabet or no alphabet at all. Furthermore, in numeroligical systems, some letters are weighted to have more significance, depending on whether they are vowels, consonants, stand at the beginning, middle, or end of a word, and so forth.

Names are especially given numerological significance. Of course a person may have many names, a first name, surname, middle names, baby name, nick names, maiden name, married name, professional name, and even a name for the internet! Furthermore, if one is multilingual, then one may have a variant set of names for each language.

Birth times and dates of course consist of numbers representing second, minute, hour, day, month, year. Naturally these too are given numerological significance in a similar manner to a person's astrological birth sign. If the birth sign and the birth number have different attributes, the numerologist simply considers these to be complementary not contradictory, and he has plenty of elbow room to weight his digits and shuffle his meanings and interpretations to harmonise the readings.

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